[Assessment of physical and sports aptitudes, overtraining prevention, and prevention of doping]

Present levels of training loads--which can exceed thirty hours a week for high level sportsmen--expose to overwork then to overtraining syndrome and finally to temptation of doping. At the same time testing techniques improve, particularly exercise tests with a linearly increasing load, and the follow-up of training effects on physical fitness provides more accurate data. The specialized literature has developed the notions of cardiac frequency reserve and of oxygen intake reserve within the last ten years. These notions, as those of produced power reserve, were applied here to assess the ventilatory threshold of 104 sportsmen (51 cyclists with high endurance and 53 team sportsmen with lower endurance) and of 223 sedentary witnesses. They allow, when completed with absolute level of aerobic endurance, to appreciate physical fitness of sportsmen all along sports season, to predict their capabilities to progress by an increase of training load or to reinforce the hypothesis of an over-working onset.